I want to be the one to wait for you when you are late. I want to be the one that rushes to you when you are waiting.  I want to be the one that smiles at the sight of you, searching for me in a crowded room. I want to be the one that finds a reason, any reason, to say your name throughout the day, just for the pleasure of my lips shaping those sounds, just for the pleasure of hearing those sounds spoken aloud.   

I want to be the one trailing my fingers over the daily traces of you – the pen you use to write with, the cork from the wine you open, the glass you drink from, the towel that hangs over the shower, still damp from your body.  I want to laugh, embarrassed, that I smell your clothes before washing them…but I want to do it anyway, breathing deeply into your shorts and shirts, your workout gear and your sweaters, breathing for the familiar, elusive scent of you.   

I want to be the one who simmers beneath you every day, every night, anytime, anyplace.  I want to ride you and be ridden, I want to whisper to you what I want, what I want you to want. I want to strain, breathless, to hear you pour your desires into the cup of my ear. I want to stand you up naked before me so that my eyes and hands could freely travel the magnificent length of you. I want to hold your face in my hands, roll my fingers over the many textures of you.  I want to absorb the sweat of your body in the palm of my hand, the cup of my stomach, the delta of my sex. 

I want to always, always celebrate the vulnerable soft skin of your neck with my lips. I want to kiss your closed and sleeping eyes in the dark like a prayer. I want to wake with the smell of you saturating my skin. I want to seek the pure visceral pleasure of physical movement with you. I want to treasure your sweat like beads of the realm.  I want to walk with you, run with you, strain and flow and lift and glide and fly with you. I want to relish your power and strength as if it were food.  And sometimes I want to lie with you, quiet in music or books, silence and time.   

I want to take pleasure in the ever-presentness of you: the rhythm of your breathing as you sleep, the way your right hand reaches for me as you drive with your left, the way your fingers graze the small of my back as we walk, the long elegant line of your thigh when you cross your legs, the arch of your eyebrow when you are intrigued or ironic or amused, the curve of your mouth when you smile at me, the breadth of your shoulders as you rise above me in the darkness, ready for love. 

I want to watch your moods the way a dolphin watches the sea, the way a flower watches the sun.  Your anger, joy, sadness, introspection, passion, absorption -- I want to map them all, the cartographer of your emotions, the caretaker of your heart.  I want to travel with you to places where the sun lies hot and yellow on the skin and I want to kiss you at the curved blue edge of an ocean that sparkles like a shattered mirror of endless light. I want to journey with you into snowy-peaked mountains where our breath smokes slowly from our mouths in cold white plumes. 

I want to lie together in the canopied beds of fine hotels in elegant cities; I want to sweat with you beneath the canvas roof of a tent, a forest or desert or mountain rising all around us, vast and silent witness to the way our bodies fight toward love in the untamed dark.   

I want to press your fingers to the warm taut skin of my stomach, feeling with you the rounding pulse of life beneath.  I want to search for signs of you in the life we bring forth – a slight uptilt to the eyes, a full upper lip, a bony ridge behind the ear – and I want to find quiet pleasure in this proliferation of what I love best, I want to find contentment in the lengthening of the mortal link between you and the earth I walk in such gratitude and amazement. 

I want to watch the changing seasons of you: the long slow tidal invasion of age that will make the journey of knowing your face and body, mind and heart so continuous and changeable, so endlessly and beautifully absorbing.  

I want to ask you, do you want all of me, all of this? and be joyful in the asking. I want to hold your hand, laughing, and perhaps I want to sit back and watch the way tall white clouds sail the sky while I wait for your reply.  And all would be still:  I don’t want to imagine my life beyond that point, waiting, content, for your answer. Waiting for you, my love, my love. My love.